If you own NVDA, TSLA, AAPL or another large stock in a brokerage account, there is now a second market on the same name. Perpetual contracts on US stocks trade on Hyperliquid around the clock. You do not have to trade one to learn something from it. This article is for the shareholder who wants to read the perp and has no plan to touch it.
What the perp is
A stock perp is a contract that follows the stock’s price and never expires. It settles in a stablecoin and holds no shares. Owning the perp is not owning the company. Stock perps, explained covers the instrument.
Each perp has a mark price, which is what the perp trades at, and an oracle price, which is the reference it follows. The gap between them is the premium.
An off-hours price
Your broker shows the last trade from the stock market. On a Saturday that is Friday’s price. The perp kept trading. For the seven largest index names, Trader measures the perp’s price now against the perp’s own price at the cash close and lists them with the largest move first.
Read that figure as a market price on another venue. It is real, and people traded there. It is not the stock’s price, and weekend trading is thinner than a weekday session. A perp move on Sunday is a reading to carry into the next session, nothing more. The implied open sets out the rules.
Funding: who is paying to hold
Funding is charged hourly. When it is positive, longs pay shorts. To compare it with other rates, multiply the hourly rate by 24 and by 365. That is a unit conversion with no compounding.
On 4 October 2026 most large markets showed funding of about 5.5% a year, the formula’s resting value. Funding at rest says little. Funding well above it says longs are paying up to stay in. Sharply negative funding says shorts are. For a shareholder that is a view of leveraged positioning on your stock that the stock market does not publish. Funding on a stock perp goes deeper.
Open interest: how much is riding on it
Open interest is the value of contracts outstanding. Rising open interest means new positions are being opened. Falling means they are being closed. Total open interest across the stock, index and commodity perps was about $3.9 billion on 4 October 2026.
The venue does not serve open-interest history. NoVo’s collector has recorded each perp’s open interest, funding and premium on every pass since 4 October 2026, so the change can be shown.
The same ticker, more than once
Hyperliquid lets outside teams list their own perp markets on separate books. The same stock can be listed on more than one, each with its own price and open interest. They are separate markets. Do not add them together, and do not be surprised when two prices for one ticker differ slightly.
Where it stops
A stock perp has no dealer gamma, no flip and no walls. The readings are price, premium, funding, open interest and volume. Not every stock has a perp, and there is none on IWM or the Russell 2000.
The Stocks On-Chain tab on the Crypto Market Map lists every stock and index perp. The Perps & Futures tab on Trader carries the index and mega-cap perps. Both show readings and neither gives advice.